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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 23, 5 June 1950, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia is moving ahead to complete Russification. No Czech or Slovakian Stalinist is to be spared who at any time has shown the slightest tendency to criticize the Russian masters.
Vladimir Clementis, until recently foreign minister, will find no mercy, regardless of his recent confession of “error.” This was made plain by his successor in office, Viliam Siroky, in a speech delivered to the closing session of the congress of the Slovak branch of the party.
Only complete, lifelong, unthinking subservience to Stalin can qualify any Czech or Slovak for high political office. Listen to Siroky speaking, with reference to Clementis:
“But to fail in 1939 when the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was concluded was to lose faith in the Soviet Union. It means that Comrade Clementis lost his faith in Stalin. But a Communist must have unconditional faith in the Soviet Union and in the Great Stalin in every situation and under all circumstances.”
But in this same speech Siroky himself made a further statement which may, one day, be used against him. In an attack on Smidke, leader of the Slovak branch, Siroky stated that Smidke had not been charged with bourgeois nationalism “only because he is of working-class origin, because he was graduated from the Lenin school in Moscow and because the party made a great investment in him.”
That is pretty serious talk for a Stalinist inquisitor. Of course everyone understands that if poor Smidke were, in fact, to be charged with bourgeois nationalism, all the above-mentioned investment would have to be buried either in the salt mines or under six feet of Czechoslovak soil. There’s no getting around that in Stalinland.
But at the same time Siroky can be charged with lack of faith in the methods of the Russian GPU and its Great Inspirer, Stalin, who has thus buried hundreds of graduates of the Lenin school and who has cashed in the checks on so many similar investments of the Russian party that he is sometimes also known as the Great Liquidator.
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Last updated: 27 January 2024